Is it just me or does anyone else think that all front-loading video recorders should have had a battery backup for the loading mechanism so that in the event of a power failure the tape is safely unlaced and ejected from the machine? Panasonic even suggest using three AA batteries to activate the loading motor in the event of a failure, talk about closing the stable door after the horse has bolted.

I ask because a very expensive S-VHS machine of mine recently failed after power was suddenly restored after a cut. The tape was a cheap one someone sent me so I don't care if that's ruined but the mechanism will need some work doing to it.

An odd post? In all my time of using VHS. If the machine has lost power, the mechanism just stops where it is. Upon "wakeup" the machine senses where the tape is, and ejects it as normal? Never caused a problem here...

ntscuser wrote:The loading motor worm drive has failed, a common problem with the K7 deck. I haven't yet attempted to remove the tape other than pressing the eject button.

That is mechanism failure though, and that can happen to anything mechanical that takes the media into a machine, cassette decks, 8-tracks,DVD/CD players and even certain types of record players (Sharp springs to mind )

Edit: I wasn't being obtuse or difficult, just it wasn't clear from your OP re: power related, besides battery back-up wouldn't help in the slightest where a loading component (belt, cam or worm etc.) is physically damaged or jammed etc.

Red to black wrote:That is mechanism failure though, and that can happen to anything mechanical that takes the media into a machine, cassette decks, 8-tracks,DVD/CD players and even certain types of record players (Sharp springs to mind )

But one which could have been avoided with a little more thought to the design. The timer has battery backup but what use is that if the mechanism fails?

Red to black wrote:Edit: I wasn't being obtuse or difficult, just it wasn't clear from your OP re: power related, besides battery back-up wouldn't help in the slightest where a loading component (belt, cam or worm etc.) is physically damaged or jammed etc.

True but in this case I believe it was the extra strain put on the mechanism by the sudden loss then return of mains power which caused it to fail. On the plus side it was relatively unimportant component which failed and many a K-deck must have been spared serious damage by the weak coupling between the loading motor and the worm gear.

As you say modern mechs could have been a bit better thought out, the G-deck could fail in spectacular ways then K decks, the later Z-mech and Philips Turbo decks all suffered similar problems, but even earlier machines from the JVC/Thorn stable suffered from loading belt problems before any of the aforementioned decks.Then we had the "syscon anomaly" of the Sanyo 5000 series Beta machines whereby if the deck suffered from take-up failure (idler) the machine would promptly lace up and wreck the loose tape in the loading ring gear.

I don't believe a brief power outage would really contribute to the mechanical failure of your particular machine, probably just a coincidence, your machine has a SMPSU with a soft start, plus that particular deck from JVC wasn't the most robust by any stretch of the imagination, in fact I would go so far as to say the last two JVC made decks were pretty dire by JVC standards.